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SPENGLER
Why radical Islam might
defeat the West
"Does Spengler
know, for instance, that in the last century 2,000
distinct ethnic groups have gone extinct?" Eric Garrett
asks in his June 12 riposte, A question of identity,
to an earlier article of mine, Neo-cons in a religious bind.
Garrett's organization, the World
Conservation Union, is devoted to preserving fragile
cultures. As a matter of fact, I reported in this space
that in the next decade, yet another 2,000 distinct
ethnic groups would go extinct (Live and Let Die of April
13, 2002). Ignore the endangered Ewoks for a moment, Mr
Garrett, and explain why the imperial peoples of the
past two centuries - Germans, Japanese, French,
Italians, Russians, and so forth - have elected to
disappear, through failure to reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8).
Garrett and I focus on the
same data, but with different agendas. His concern is
the mass extinction of primitive cultures, which I think
inevitable; my concern is the fall of Western
civilization and the possible triumph of radical Islam.
In neither case does the influence of Leo Strauss have
any relevance. Europe and Japan, the erstwhile imperial
oppressors of Garrett's 2,000 lost tribes, are dying out
for the same reason that oppressed peoples died out, and
thousands more soon will die out as well. With few
exceptions, they were neither butchered nor
dispossessed. Unlike the colonizers of the 16th century,
who brought smallpox, the European colonists of the 20th
century brought antibiotics. Western intervention
secured the physical existence of aboriginal cultures,
but undermined their will to live. Now it is the
Europeans themselves who are endangered.
Socrates (like Strauss) was wrong. It is not the
unexamined life that is not worth living, but the life
defined by mere animal existence. Unlike lower species,
humans require a sense of the eternal. The brute
instinct for self-preservation is a myth. It should be
no surprise. Precisely a century ago, George Bernard
Shaw in his 1903 interlude Don Juan in Hell
warned that Western hedonism would lead to depopulation.
The day is coming when great nations will find
their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the
six-roomed villa will rise in price above the family
mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the
stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the
race only by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent,
the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and
poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the
worshippers of success, of art, and of love, will all
oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility.
This brings us to the reason why Strauss has
become something of a bore. The good professor (I mean
this sincerely) hung his political-science hat on
Hobbes, who threw out the traditional concept of
God-given rights of man. He derived the social contract
instead from man's brute instinct for self-preservation.
In order to protect themselves against violence in the
state of nature, men surrender part of their freedom to
a ruler who in turn guarantees their security. By
deriving natural rights from brute instinct rather than
divine law, Strauss argued (Natural Right and
History, 1950), Hobbes invented modern political
science, that is, a discipline distinct from faith. Thus
he made it possible to create a practicable republic
composed of selfish men, unlike the utopian vision of
Plato, which depended upon virtuous rulers. (Strauss
sought to conjure out of Plato's writings a view similar
to that of Hobbes, and I will let the classicists argue
over whether his "esoteric" reading has merit.) Kant
summarized the modern viewpoint: "We could devise a
constitution for a race of devils, if only they were
intelligent."
History exposes Hobbes's
"self-preservation instinct" as a chimera. If men have
no more than physical self-preservation, self-disgust
will stifle them. Strauss knew that Hobbes's approach
leads inevitably to nihilism, and he proposed a return
to Athenian political philosophy as an antidote,
although what that might accomplish is unclear. His
students still quibble fruitlessly over whether Strauss
"stayed with the moderns" or "went back to Athens".
Did someone in Washington take Kant literally
and set about devising a constitution for devils with
the Arab world in mind? Does it matter? Washington must
talk about democracy in the Arab world, Strauss or no.
Strauss, as in the Jewish joke about the man who sees a
shop whose windows are full of clocks. He enters and
tells the proprietor, "I want to buy a clock." The
proprietor responds, "I don't sell clocks." "Then what
do you do?" "I am a mohel [ritual circumciser]."
"Then why do you put clocks in the window?" "What do you
want me to put in the window?"
Which brings us
to the threat of radical Islam. "You are decadent and
hedonistic. We on the other hand are willing to die for
what we believe, and we are a billion strong. You cannot
kill all of us, so you will have to accede to what we
demand." That, in a nutshell, constitutes the Islamist
challenge to the West.
Neither the demographic
shift toward Muslim immigrants nor meretricious
self-interest explains Western Europe's appeasement of
Islam, but rather the terrifying logic of the numbers.
That is why President Bush has thrown his prestige
behind the rickety prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian
peace. And that is why Islamism has only lost a battle
in Iraq, but well might win the war.
Not a
single Western strategist has proposed an ideological
response to the religious challenge of Islam. On the
contrary: the Vatican, the guardian-of-last-resort of
the Western heritage, has placed itself squarely in the
camp of appeasement. Except for a few born-again
Christians in the United States, no Western voice is
raised in criticism of Islam itself. The trouble is that
Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United
States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once
believed, and therefore has neither the aptitude nor the
inclination for ideological warfare.
Relativism
is America's religion, as Leo Strauss complained. Only
superficially can one explain this by the peculiar
composition of the American people - that is, a
collection of immigrants who willfully abandoned their
cultures to begin again there, and view each other's
customs with a peculiar blend of sentimentality and
indifference. Americans fail to grasp decisive strategic
issues not only because they misunderstand other
cultures, but because they avert their gaze from the
painful episodes of their own history. In his book
The Metaphysical Club, Prof Louis Menand observes
that the horrors of the Civil War discredited the
idealism of young New Englanders (his case study is
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr), producing the vapid
pragmatism that has reigned since then in American
culture. Americans suffer from a form of traumatic
amnesia, such that every generation of Americans must
learn the hard way.
Garrett thinks that
Strauss's critique of relativism provides a moral prop
for American unilateralism. He can relax. Strauss's case
is weak. It amounts to reductio ad absurdum: "All
societies have their ideals, cannibal societies no less
than civilized ones. If principles are sufficiently
justified by the fact that they are accepted by a
society, the principles of cannibalism are as defensible
or sound as those of civilized life." Now comes Garrett,
whose job it is to defend cannibal societies' right to
exist. Strauss in his worst nightmares could not have
imagined Garrett.
Strauss cannot convince
Garrett. Indeed, he could not convince himself. Strauss
knew perfectly well that philosophy could not refute
relativism ("radical historicism"), hence his
helplessness before Heidegger's parlour tricks. Strauss
gave up on Nietzsche largely because Heidegger offered a
sharper critique of rationalism. (Garrett's
interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosemite seems
idiosyncratic, to say the least, considering that
Nietzsche denounced his erstwhile idol Wagner as a Jew
after Wagner made peace with Christianity in
Parsifal.)
Critics of the
neo-conservatives accuse them of following Machiavelli,
via Strauss. The charge sticks to Michael Ledeen, but
surely not to Irving Kristol, the "godfather" of
neo-conservatism, who spurned Machiavelli as a "the
first nihilist". Who cares? Machiavelli was a Florentine
lightweight who hoped that the poisoner Cesare Borgia
would unite Italy. What Italian has done anything of
political importance in the past 500 years? What effect
on history had all the stiletto-and-arsenic games of the
Italian condottiere?
Grim men of faith - Loyola,
Oldebarnevelt, Richilieu, Mazarin - led the religious
wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the
Florentines amused the tourists (The sacred heart of darkness, February 11). The trouble with Strauss, I
reiterate, is that he was an atheist, rather a
disadvantage in a religious war. The West has no armed
prophet. It doesn't even have an armed theologian.
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